Katy Wix is Wales’ newest funny girl

Move over French and Saunders, a new comedy double act is helping to change the face of funny women on the small screen. Kirstie McCrum has a laugh with the Welsh half of Anna And Katy on going from Pontypridd to Channel 4

Dressing up and putting on funny voices is Katy Wix’s full-time job, and she’s pleased to report that it’s something she’s been doing for as long as she can remember. The difference, of course, is that now she’s getting paid for it.

At 33, Katy is the co-star of a new Channel 4 sketch show, Anna And Katy. Halfway through a six-part series, it’s been well-received by viewers and critics, and is the culmination of a decade of hard graft for Katy and her comedy partner, Anna Crilly.

“The fact that I get to do it every day is amazing. My parents were a bit like, ‘You’ve been doing it since you were about five, so we’re not really surprised’. I’ve been doing stupid voices and putting on glasses since I was really young to do impressions of people so they half expected it.”

The actor, who was born in Pontypridd and brought up in the Vale of Glamorgan’s picturesque Peterston-super-Ely, is making the most of being in control of the creative side of things after six years in sitcom Not Going Out as Tim Vine’s ditsy girlfriend, Daisy.

“There’s nothing like finally getting to write and perform your own material, it’s always been the dream.

“Doing Not Going Out has been fantastic and it’s a great job, but it is different because you turn up and you’re an actor for hire. It is quite fun to do and we all get on so well, we’re like a really happy little family,” she explains.

While she was growing up, Katy’s real family were always supportive of her interest in performance.

“My parents were actors and my brother is a musician. My dad worked in St David’s Hall (in Cardiff) for years and they both worked at Welsh National Opera. So I was really aware of the arts scene in Cardiff from a young age. It was nice that we shared this thing, because they were really proud of me and they understand what I do.”

Some of Katy’s earliest memories are of performing with her brother.

“Me and my older brother used to do little stupid sketches from a young age, so it was always there but I never thought I could make a living from it, even though I knew I could do it every day.

“I definitely went through stages of rebelling against it and announced that I was going to be an anthropologist, but that lasted about two weeks.”

From home in South Wales, Katy went to university in Warwick and then on to the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in Cardiff for a year.

“I got into writing at college, but I knew that I wanted to get up and do the practical side too. When I was at the RWCMD, I naturally remember really wanting to do the Royal Shakespeare Company thing, that was the first plan, but then I became really drawn to comedy,” she recalls.

From a young age, she took to studying the comic personalities that she felt had perfected their own artform.

“I was obsessed with it in a really geeky way, rushing home to record everything – stuff like Alan Partridge, I used to watch that obsessively and wore out my VHS copies. I would record things off the radio, loads of Chris Morris’ (Brass Eye creator) stuff and I remember the first time I heard the Mighty Boosh and Vic and Bob stuff. My brother used to sit and watch all that and for the 17th time, he’d still be laughing over and over again, so I was always into comedy.”

As well as success on her own, appearing not only in Not Going Out, but also in BBC programmes Torchwood, Miranda and the resurrected Absolutely Fabulous, Katy is finally glad to be experiencing acclaim for the work that she does with Anna. The 37-year-old actress spent five years playing Magda in the series Lead Balloon alongside dour comic Jack Dee and was a natural foil from the start for Katy’s wide-eyed naivety.

“We first met in 2003 when I was just about to graduate from the RWCMD and I entered this stand-up competition. It was all really new people and she was in it too. She’d been doing stand-up for a few years by then and was quite good but it was my first attempt at it, so it was really odd.

“I think we met at the final and we were the only people who laughed at each other, like when you fall in love with someone. Everyone else faded away and I was just like, ‘Hi, I think you’re like me’. It was really sweet.

“She was so deadpan and I didn’t know what I was doing, I had just sort of strung some sentences together. I remember being so nervous, I was leaving these massive pauses in between everything I was saying and just looking around wild-eyed, which Anna thought was a brilliant character, but it was just nerves.

“She was finding it really funny, but I wasn’t even aware that I was doing it. I’d say something and then I’d look around for about a minute and then I’d say something else.

“But I remember watching her thinking she was really funny. Neither of us won the competition but I think she was third, so technically she’s funnier than me,” she laughs.

A few months later, Anna called and asked Katy to come up to London to write with her, a move which saw the pair’s comedic relationship take off.

“I was still living with my parents in Wales, so I would just get the train up to London and we’d write in the pub and then I’d get the train home.

“Writing and performing together, we’ve had several monikers over the past few years.”

Their surreal double-act was originally called Penny Spubb, but after a few name changes, the pair are now simply Anna And Katy. They have performed at the Edinburgh Fringe three times and made a pilot for BBC Radio Two, but the Channel 4 show is the first time they’ve managed to get mainstream television exposure – not counting the pair’s appearances on the Harveys furniture promos seen before and after episodes of the ITV1 soap Coronation Street.

Through the course of this series of Anna And Katy, viewers have seen Katy go from being a presenter on a German version of Countdown to the Sue Perkins half of a pseudo Mel and Sue presenting duo on Great British Bake Off take-off Rice Britannia – and more.

Katy’s performances throughout are subtle and considered, whether she’s dressed as an executive taking on a mock-up of The Apprentice or as barmaid draped over the pumps in spectacle-endorsing Coronation Street-alike The Lane.

She says that it’s all in a day’s work, but admits that the duo have been pulled back in occasionally by the television company.

“It is more of a committee but Channel 4 were amazing; we made the pilot two years ago and they just sort of said, ‘More of the same please’.

“They had seen what they were getting, but we had to be reined in all the time, because we always enjoy the really small detail and all of the little quirks at a slower pace, so there was always a sort of pressure to make things kind of punchy and snappy and get to the joke quickly. We quite enjoy playing around I think, but you don’t want to do just sheer indulgence. Our producer John Petrie is wonderful and he’s very good at saying, ‘I think you’re having fun, but I’m not’.”

One of Katy’s own favourite sketches is ‘Congratulation’, a sofa-based talk show with the girls in the starring roles. It’s most notable because of the Jamaican accents the pair adopt, a quirk which Katy admits was almost accidental.

“That was a weird one because first of all it was going to be a show just for women about women – a bit like Loose Women, it was going to be a sort of pastiche on that, but a show that patronised women.

“We found it really funny, but it wasn’t working in that original format. One day we were just sitting in a room and someone said, ‘Try it with a Jamaican accent’ and everyone laughed and then it just stuck, and now that’s the sketch.

“In our heads, the show isn’t that surreal. I suppose it’s more silly than anything. It’s not wilfully odd, we’ve always tried to make sure people know what’s going on.”

Like most women working in comedy, she acknowledges that there is a debate to be had about the equality of the sexes in her industry, but she’s reticent to become a flagbearer for the cause simply because she feels it’s slightly outdated.

“We do engage in the debate, although in some ways there isn’t a debate because I know plenty of very amusing women and lots of not-funny women, and similarly with men.

“I think our attitude has been that we want to be judged as individuals. We’ve been an act for nearly 10 years, so we just feel like we’re another act who is just beavering away. There’s something slightly depressing when people want to make it about comedy and you get compared to one another on the grounds that you also have a womb.

“A friend of mine who is a schoolteacher wants me to give a talk to her sixth form girls’ school and I was like, ‘I’ve got nothing to say, why would they listen to me?’ She said she thought it was really important that they saw women on television who are ‘powerful’ and have been allowed to be creatively free, which was nice.”

Appearing on bills and festivals with other comedians means that Katy knows a lot of them well, and says it gives her heart that there is so much in the way of talent out there these days.

“We all sort of know each other on the circuit, and it’s such a thriving circuit, the character and sketch world.

“From Edinburgh Festival and stuff, there are a lot now, people like Bridget Christie, Sara Pascoe – there are more than ever, and there are lots of really interesting surreal acts.”

Looking to the future, she is keen to make another series for Channel 4. The decision is out of their hands, but signs are good following the success of this run.

“The response to Anna And Katy has been overwhelming. The morning (after the first one) I woke up and felt like I’d won an OBE; friends and people from my past got in touch and were so overwhelmingly nice.

“I mean, yes, they have to say that, they’re my friends, but we have been really lucky, we’ve had some really nice reviews.

“It’s not for everyone, we’ve always split people.

“We have other ideas of things we might do next together, but we’ve been together for so many years and it’s taken us getting to this point, so I think we just hope that we’re at the beginning of it, rather than the end.”

Anna And Katy is on Channel 4 on Wednesdays at 10.35pm

What the critics say

“I’m not going to describe what I saw, mainly because it was through tears as I lay on the floor and laughed my legs off, except to say that German Countdown was possibly my favourite (“Ist OK vurd for git-to-s**t, Suzie?”) and that there is nothing to gladden the heart more than two women on telly doing really, really stupid, really, really brilliant, really, really funny stuff”

Lucy Mangan in The Guardian

“Rather like a modern-day Morecambe and Wise, one of the nicest things about (the show) was how much its protagonists seem to be enjoying themselves... It’s a sketch show that made me laugh, and for a genre that many have dismissed as dead and buried, that’s no mean feat”

Emma Gosnell in The Telegraph

“The idiot-speak in Anna Crilly and Katy Wix’s spoof The Apprentice is frothing nicely: ‘Business in the workplace can help achieve synergy for tomorrow,’ says a gormless team-member. Or, my favourite, ‘Can I just answer that myself with a ‘no’?’ smarms Wix, as a vacuous project manager. Some sketches work better – much better – than others. Crilly and Wix as two butch quadbike instructors and an obscene game show fronted by Brian Dowling are weak and over-long. But Olden Roadhaus, the foul-mouthed German version of Antiques Roadshow, is a winner”

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